Others are to be drunk, as in these words (O. ii. 330):—
To fetch a poisonous drug that he may cast it into the bowl
and make an end of all of us.
So much for medicines in the Homeric poems.
Divination is useful to man like medicine. A part of this the Stoics call artificial, as the inspection of entrails and birds' oracles, lots, and signs. All of these they call in general artificial. But what is not artificial, and is not acquired by learning, are trances and ecstasy, Homer knew, too, of these phenomena. But he also knew of seers, priests, interpreters of dreams, and augurs. A certain wise man in Ithaca he tells of (O. ii 159):—
He excelled his peers in knowledge of birds and in uttering
words of fate.
And Odysseus, praying, says (O. xx. 100):—
Let some one I pray of the folk that are waking show me a
word of good omen within and without; let soon other sign be
revealed to me from Zeus.
Snoring with him is a good sign. A divinely inspired seer is with the suitors, telling the future by divine inspiration. Once, too, Helenus says (I. vii. 53):—
He was the recipient of a divine voice.
By revelation from th' eternal gods.
He gives cause of believing that Socrates had actually communications from the voice of the daemon.